Subject: Review: The Eye Creatures (1965)

From: "Shane R. Burridge" <[email-masked]>
Date: 21 Oct 1997 04:33:46 GMT

The Eye Creatures (1965) 80m. 

Some movies are bad because of their writing, their acting, or their
directing, but nothing is spared in this insipid horror flick from the
60s.  Armed with a script that could have been written by your average
twelve-year old, our clean-cut young heroes Stan and Susan find
themselves spending most of their elopement trying to convince adults
that the local necking spot in the woods is being invaded by
saucermen.  Will they listen?  Of course not. 

It's hard to tell which is the single worst feature of this movie, but
the writing must surely be a likely contender for the top spot.  Every
phone conversation is ridiculous, and when the dialogue isn't
expository it's just plain dumb.  How about that line when Susan's
pop, who happens to be the city attorney, snaps at her hit-and-run
suspect boyfriend "You're lucky in one respect!  The man you killed
was a nobody!"  To take the heat off the script, the acting is pretty
rank, too (in some cases the cast is required to pretend they're
driving stationary cars and act at the same time).  At least Cynthia
Hull (Susan) has the foresight to distract audiences from her
performance with her vaguely ethnic, gravity-defying hairdo.  The most
unforgivable failing point of the movie, however, is the monster
attack itself.  Attack?  What attack?  I've never seen an alien strike
force so ineffective and vulnerable (one hopeless specimen walks off a
cliff at one point, for no apparent reason).  The eye creatures,
conveniently human-sized humanoids with bubbly heads, manage to do
away with at least one unfortunate bystander, even if it is only by
chasing him very, very slowly and pawing at the air in front of his
face, but after that the "attack" is all but over.  In any case, the
monsters have got to be less of a public menace than the neighborhood
crank who keeps stomping about the woods with his shotgun in search of
trespassing teens.

At first, the film appears to be indulging its young target audience
by portraying all adults and authority figures (parents, the military,
the police) as skeptical, patronizing, or incompetent.  It's a little
perverse when you consider the film was made by adults, which is why
it should be reappraised.  Sure, these teens save the day, but in the
end they're just as ineffectual and witless as the adults they
complain about.  In the final scene Stan and Susan have forgotten
about their marriage (their first step into adulthood, maybe) and
admit they’re just a couple of self-professed "crazy kids" canoodling
along with the rest of the gang in their cars.  But what director
Larry Buchanan (of MARS NEEDS WOMEN fame) is most famous for in this
flick is his daring juxtaposition of daylight scenes with night-time
ones.  No, not really.  The production's day-for-night technique was
just as inept as the rest of the picture.